Tag Archives: Thomas Hosking

Every now and then you bump into an artist that “get’s it”. Sure there are a lot of talented people out there but Thomas deserves a spot on my page with his amazing piece called “Italian Kitchen” Creating a great scene is one thing, but bringing it to life is another……

I am currently studying my Masters in Computer Games Development at the University of Bolton (UK), my main area of skills is in 3D Modelling and Texturing. This scene was about paying tribute to my Nan, when I was a young my father would take me to visit her, she lived out in the country and spent a lot of her time in the kitchen as she enjoyed preparing food and baking. I wanted to capture that sense of nostalgia from my childhood by recreating that section of her kitchen.

This scene was rendered using ‘mental ray’ with ‘Maya 2017’ as well as ‘Photoshop CS6‘and ‘Quixel Suite’ for texturing. The whole thing took a little over 4 months on and off to complete, as I also had University work to finish on top of it.

I consider modelling to be half the work and texturing the other, however, in this case, I’d say I spent about a third of my time modelling and the rest unwrapping UV’s, making diffuse, specular, gloss, normal and displacement maps for my materials and setting up the lights. It was a challenge getting the glass to behave correctly with the lighting, I spent a large portion of my time tweaking reflection, refraction and Ray Depth values, then re-rendering until I got a result I was comfortable with.

The lighting is what really brings the scene together in my opinion. I finished modelling the environment a few days before starting the final renders, which was to set up the lighting, the colour and the shading to how I wanted it. I used Image Based Lighting, as well as a Directional Light and an Area Light with a Portal Light attached to it that covered the windows, accompanied by a Light Fog.

Overall, I really enjoyed making this environment and all the challenges that came with it, I’m very happy with how it turned out. When making a scene that has a lot of detail packed into not only the models but also the materials, it always feels incredible to see it all come together in the end.